As a frail President Biden walks onto the debate stage this week with the considerable challenge of defending a disastrous record on foreign policy, inflation, and border policies, he is certain to try to use healthcare as an area to score points against President Trump. The campaign is already airing ads on the subject. The media largely ignored or misrepresented Trump’s record on healthcare but there is one area that probably can’t be ignored any longer: Biden’s Medicare policies are hitting seniors hard.
As he works to boost support from seniors, Biden has attempted to paint Trump as a threat to Medicare, but the truth is that Biden and the Democrats raided Medicare for green energy subsidies and America’s seniors are paying the price. In 2022, Democrats rammed through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) with major changes to Medicare’s prescription drug reimbursement—previously an area of bipartisanship—without a single Republican vote.
President Trump by contrast quietly pursued bipartisan changes, engaging with Senators Grassley and Wyden, Majority Leader McConnell and Speaker Pelosi for negotiations on a bipartisan drug pricing bill to help seniors manage drug costs and preserve the program, but that construct was tossed aside when Democrats took both legislative chambers and the White House and had the chance to implement drug price controls.
Much has been written about how Biden’s drug price setting scheme has led numerous developers to cancel research programs, and more cancellations are around the corner. But what has not gotten enough attention is that in a real feat of policy incompetence, cost savings for seniors are still years away, but seniors are already paying more for drug coverage. Plans requested an average premium increase of 21.5% for 2024 and requests will likely be elevated for 2025 as well. While Democrats included a cap on one factor used to determine beneficiary premiums, the cap does not extend to the premium as a whole. This, coupled with poorly designed changes to Medicare Part D’s structure triggered astronomical premium increases.
Part D instability will grow in 2025 and 2026 as the program’s price fixing provisions kick in and the rebates that keep premiums down disappear. Premiums will need to go up or benefit generosity will need to go down. Some plans may simply stop offering coverage in certain areas next year.
Why would Democrats destabilize the program and impose higher costs on seniors? A generous explanation might be that they didn’t think that this many drug development programs would get cancelled and they didn’t understand that the changes they were making to Part D’s structure would be catastrophic. But a more ideological explanation, and I think a more accurate one, is that Democrats just got greedy, which is ironic since this is their standard attack line against drug companies.
When President Trump proposed restructuring Part D to help seniors, all of the savings in drugs costs accrued to seniors and stayed in the Medicare program. But Democrats needed to loot Part D to pay for the green energy subsidies of the IRA.
Put another way, Biden cut benefits from people with a median income of $36,000 per year to subsize cars purchased by individuals who earn five times as much. This $240 billion raid on Medicare would be shocking if they hadn’t done it before; Democrats cut $450 billion to $716 billion from Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act.
When Republicans had both legislative houses and the White House under President Trump, we cut taxes. When Democrats had both houses under Obama and Biden, they raided Medicare to create new programs.
So, when Biden says Medicare won’t be cut on his watch, people should know he already did. Under Donald Trump; benefits were made more generous, particularly for Medicare Advantage enrollees, who Trump allowed to better manage their chronic conditions with enhanced benefits, such as home modifications to address disability. Ironically, the Biden Administration has spent the last three years squeezing Medicare Advantage and costing seniors more money. All the while, they have demonized for-profit companies in health care as they waged war against them.
For the first time in history Thursday night’s debate will feature two candidates who have both held the office defending their records, attacking the other’s. Biden’s team is hoping healthcare might provide a rare window to go on offense, but their actions while in office betray them. And by any objective measure, Trump’s record protecting Medicare is far better than the Biden record of looting it.
Joe Grogan is a visiting senior fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center and served as domestic policy adviser to President Donald Trump, 2019-20.
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